Vladius

Throwing stormtroopers around is a fun novelty, the graphics were nice, but that’s about all I can say with positivity. I hate the main character and he’s not interesting. QTEs are awful and take away from the feeling of player skill. Once you get enemies that can’t be instantly grabbed with the Force or killed in a few hits, the power fantasy goes away and it becomes a somewhat frustrating average action game. While the idea that the Emperor and Vader accidentally created the rebellion is some fun irony, I don’t think it should be canon and it detracts from the rebels getting set up on their own.

The real stars of the game were supposed to be the Euphoria AI system that would have gotten used in the cancelled Indiana Jones game they were doing, and wound up in GTA 4, and the particle-based physics engine where you can deform materials in realistic ways, wood splintering, metal denting, etc. Both made it into the game but in very light and limited ways. Stormtroopers will grab onto stuff but don’t behave in a particularly intelligent way, and there are some wooden beams, metal doors, panes of glass and so on but they’re infrequent and as soon as you destroy them they vanish. I don’t think either piece of tech became anything more than a gimmick, but I think they could be really cool with today’s hardware.

I don’t think they wanted to be Anti-Star Wars, they just wanted to make it without depending on existing Star Wars to make it good or interesting. They wanted it to be more Star Wars rather than recycling existing Star Wars.

Jar Jar Bricks said:

I’m not sure where else to post this. Has anybody seen this excellent video of the Palpatine/Mace duel?

https://youtu.be/YC8VRvDNw1k?si=K24jw4HL_yBILYNS

I think the only rough spot is around 2:33 with their spinning moves, but I can’t believe how much better the duel flows by just being sped up a bit. The CGI backflip doesn’t really feel out of place anymore.

I’m okay with stuff like this.

The only thing that bothers me is when people call it “lore accurate” or something. The movies are the lore! You’re seeing the lore with your eyeballs!

The pre-special edition VHS tapes I grew up on, looks like it was the 1995 box set

My biggest problem with Dark Empire is that Luke’s plan works. It’s an understandable error for a hero to want to infiltrate and sabotage the enemy from the inside. It’s understandable why that’s a bad idea when the dark side is involved. But it basically does everything it was supposed to with no lasting consequences. He gets the world devastators shut off and saves everyone. Then when he would go evil, Leia saves him and he’s fine. It trivializes the whole concept of turning to the dark side and makes the Emperor look idiotic for gambling everything on trying to turn Luke twice in a row.

I think Timothy Zahn noticed it and tried to retcon in the idea that there were lasting effects. I think it’s in Vision of the Future. Mara Jade tells Luke that there’s always been something off about him ever since those events and it affected his judgment during a lot of the other EU stories.

Still though Luke’s plan seems like it was the only way out of that situation, at least in the short term when Palpatine had everyone dead to rights.

G&G-Fan said:

I’m a Jabba scene hater as much as the next guy, but am I the only one who kinda finds the theatrical transition awkward and sometimes wishes there was still a scene in between? Maybe with Vader/Tarkin, or a Jabba scene where he’s portrayed with a practical effect.

As a person who grew up with the special edition, its odd having a very quick crossfade between two shots that look almost identical in composition yet are very different in mood.

I’ve never noticed

G&G-Fan said:

The first time someone refers to Luke as “Skywalker” is himself when telling Leia who he is.
It wouldn’t be smart for the Lars to give him his father’s last name while in hiding. So his name on Tatooine was Luke Lars.
Him announcing himself as Luke Skywalker is him reclaiming his father’s last name after finding out the truth about him (“I want to learn the ways of the Force and become a Jedi like my father.”)
He started calling himself Luke Skywalker in his own mind after Ben told him his father was a Jedi Knight. Him introducing himself to Leia is the first time he verbalizes this.

I like this one

After trying out Rogue One after Andor, I’ve been doing the original trilogy next. As I suspected, it resonates a lot more with Star Wars 1977/A New Hope than ESB or ROTJ. ANH starts with Leia as a senator, the Imperials talking about how the Emperor dissolved the senate, Luke living as an average person, and of course the Yavin base and the rebels taking on the Death Star. After that though, the rebels are the background for the main characters. Andor barely deals at all with the rebel pilots and ground troops, and other than the main characters, they’re the main stars of all the battles in the original trilogy.

Andor isn’t “better” than the movies, it’s a completely different tone and genre so you can’t really compare them. Han Solo wouldn’t exist in Andor, and neither would Obi-Wan, Yoda, Jabba, or Boba Fett. Vader and the Emperor were deliberately excluded. You could make a case for a toned down, less adventurous version of Luke, Leia, Tarkin, R2D2, and maybe C3PO or Chewbacca. No classic alien monsters like the dianoga, the space slug, or the rancor. Andor is cool but by comparison it’s dreary and a little bit lifeless. That fits for its genre but the idea that it’s somehow better than everything else in Star Wars is contemptuous. It’s just different.

This also goes for the people sneering at the awards ceremony for Luke and Han destroying the Death Star. Andor doesn’t change anything. Okay, they joined the rebellion like a day ago. So what? Everyone would jump at the chance to celebrate the people who finished the mission after so much sacrifice. Luke’s aunt and uncle, the people who raised him, got turned into charred skeletons and his home was burned down. Leia was tortured and had her planet (including her entire family) destroyed in front of her. Han gave up dealing with a bounty on his head to risk everything and join the rebellion, and he later got tortured and frozen into a block of carbon for his trouble. If there was any mission in Andor that was dangerous and risky, that probably goes double for going into the belly of the beast in the Death Star itself and making it out alive. Yes Vader let them escape so they could go back to the rebel base - there’s nothing saying he had to let anyone other than Leia do that. Luke, Han, and Chewie could have been killed or worse. Setting aside blowing up the Death Star by itself, they’ve got their rebel bona fides even if they got them relatively quickly.

Meanwhile Andor-version Mon Mothma gets to be head of state because she was born rich, went to a lot of parties, and reluctantly let her daughter marry a boy she wanted to marry. Let’s give some champions some medals, I think it’ll be okay.

I wouldn’t say Rogue One is a good transition point either because it has its own problems, but that’s another story.

Spartacus01 said:

Vladius said:

Superweapon VII said:

*yawn*

Our concept of hell doesn’t have biblical origins

yawn yeah it does

Can you elaborate?

I’m not going to watch that video but at the very least the title is misleading. Hell comes up in the bible as either Sheol/Hades like the Greek concept as a place for dead spirits, or Gehenna, which is named after a valley in Israel and symbolizes fiery torment and burning. It’s worth noting for all the people here who are fans of sanitized 21st century-friendly hippie Jesus that Christ talks more about hell (Gehenna) than anyone else in the bible.

Of course different Christians have different interpretations of how all this works, who goes to hell, how long it lasts, what the nature of it is, what the difference between Sheol and Gehenna is, etc. but it’s clearly right there in the text. The imagery and the concept of a place of punishment is obviously biblical.

Superweapon VII said:

*yawn*

Our concept of hell doesn’t have biblical origins

yawn yeah it does

DuracellEnergizer said:

I’m not a Gnostic. I find its dualism problematic, actually. But I can still appreciate it. The Old Testament’s portrayal of God isn’t 100% ugly, but it still ascribes much ugliness to God. The Gnostics rightly recognized that ugliness as antithetical to the overall message of Jesus and rejected it; they just went a little too far.

Jesus is the Old Testament God

Darth_Detritus said:

[screams in the void said:]
I have a new order to recommend: the Spoiler Order, one that preserves the famous “twists” of the franchise for longer than either the Release Order or the Machete Order.

I am curious to hear others opinions on this…

I watched a YouTube video recently that made a good case for watching chronological vs release order. Almost everyone knows of the famous “I am your father” line at this point, even non-fans, which works against the biggest reason to suggest release order.

It was a real treat watching it with someone who didn’t know the line see it for the first time.

But even if you know the twist it’s still better to do release order in my opinion. Going from Return of the Jedi to Phantom Menace is much less jarring in terms of technology and visual aesthetic compared to going from Revenge of the Sith to Star Wars. The prequels also have a lot of in-jokes, callbacks, and “coming full circle” moments that don’t mean anything unless you’re already familiar with the original trilogy. That’s how it works even if you’re just listening to the music, there’s a lot of leitmotifs that are references to themes that were already developed elsewhere.

Yeah I think the strength of the show was how it handled everyday life for people in the setting and not necessarily the grandiose speeches. What they should take away from it is:
*More subtle writing that takes a little bit more audience inference and has some mystery to it without spelling everything out.

*More of an attempt to cover areas in the setting that don’t fall into the typical mold WITHOUT resorting to a pastiche of some other genre. Not “let’s have a Godzilla episode” or “let’s have an homage to this specific western/samurai movie”, but “let’s show this guy eating cereal with his nosy mom and worrying about his career.” It’s difficult to do without making it too mundane and boring, and I think they failed at it hard when they tried to do something similar in Mandalorian season 3 because it was so incongruous with everything else.

*Practical effects, props, and especially sets with a priority for shooting on location where possible. It’s okay and often better to re-use the same sets several times as you get familiar with the place.

*More attention paid to casting. The existing characters (Cassian, Saw, Mon Mothma, etc.) had already been cast elsewhere but all the new people fit their roles flawlessly. Even minor characters were more memorable because of the casting.

I think they might take the wrong lessons away, like feeling an obligation to a “dark and gritty” tone, morally gray characters and actions, or focusing even further on the already saturated period between episodes 3 and 4.

So I tried out watching Rogue One immediately after the show. I know I said it improves it before and it does, but it had strange results.

The first half of Rogue One, which I think is weak, is greatly improved. Knowing Cassian, K2, Saw, Krennic, etc. helps it flow very naturally and helps you to care a lot more about what’s going on. Same with the rebels generally. Since the pace of the show is so slow, Rogue One, which normally feels slow early on, feels much faster by comparison. Almost too fast. Cassian almost rises to the level of secondary protagonist because you know him so well by this point. When he decides not to snipe Galen Erso it’s much more meaningful. You know his modus operandi under Luthen was to gun down anyone who could potentially be a problem, and you see that at the beginning of the movie with his contact on Kafrene. The theme toward the end of the show where he starts to embrace the Force a little bit carries through pretty well.

The part where he tells Chirrut that “this is a first for me” when he’s in Saw’s jail is hilarious because they either forgot about it or he’s lying, given that there’s an entire arc in the show about him escaping a hell prison.

There’s also an interesting dynamic with Krennic’s character. We saw him as the intimidating upper manager figure in the show, but when we see him next to Tarkin and Vader he’s in the junior leagues. There’s a feeling that everything has gone up a level and there’s a natural progression from spies running around to open conventional war.

Then the other half of the movie, which people generally see as much stronger because it has most of the action and the big battle, actually gets weaker. The idea that Jyn steps up and becomes a leader figure right away looks even more absurd because we’ve just seen how paranoid and distrustful the rebel command is and how long it’s taken them to trust Cassian. There’s some of that discussion in the council with some of the worst senators ever but it’s still odd. Then they naturally defer to her to give an inspirational speech to the soldiers on the landing craft, when Melshi is clearly their real leader. The way she suddenly becomes the most important figure in the universe with the ability to single-handedly take out a dozen stormtroopers in melee comes across as more Mary Sue-ish next to the more grounded feeling of the show where everyone receives a lot more development. Baze and Chirrut similarly feel a little more out of place.

The ending feels even more abrupt. There’s no real breather where you take in that everyone died, it just slams right into CGI Leia and credits with little explanation. This was more understandable when this was just a fan film prequel for the original movie but now it feels almost insulting, for lack of a better word.

There were some subplots that didn’t end up going anywhere. Some of it is a result of the season compression but other stuff I think they just didn’t know what to do with. The big ones are:
*Mon Mothma, her family, and anything to do with the wedding. The only major thing that affects anything else is Luthen taking out Tay Kolma. The rest is all fluff. Mon already made the “sacrifice” of marrying off her daughter in season 1, we don’t need to see it play out.
*Bail Organa staying on Coruscant. Doesn’t matter at all, he’s teleported to Yavin after the timeskip.
*Wilmon going with Saw to steal special fuel and inhale it for some reason. It seems like it’s going to lead to another bigger mission and like he’s going to join Saw’s faction, and this was a rite of passage. But the next time we see him he’s with the main rebel/Luthen group like nothing happened.
*Similarly it seems like Bix is going to start doing missions in the middle and she’ll have a Bonnie and Clyde thing with Cassian but really they were just taking revenge on the torturer guy. Her worries about killing the innocent soldier guy on their last mission, and her drug problems, don’t go anywhere either. Although it is nice that she’s happy at the end and you can say that that was the point all along.
*On a related note there’s the setup where Lonni and the other ISB guy are going to supervise the other Imperial intelligence branch working with the torturer and making sure they don’t screw it up, which could have been entertaining. But that’s dropped when he’s killed right away. Maybe that was to make it more shocking when Bix takes him out? Who knows.

Overall I still thought it was satisfying and well done and the time skips were useful for getting to the good parts quicker.

I don’t even know what to call this

Star Wars
Empire Strikes Back
Return of the Jedi
Phantom Menace
Revenge of the Sith

Picking up K2 off the ground makes perfect sense. Those droids are extremely deadly and almost impervious to blaster fire. They don’t have any counter to it. If Cassian is already hopping on a truck and it’s right there, why wouldn’t you take it back? You would want to study it for weaknesses, reverse engineer it, or use it. He stole an experimental TIE interceptor at the beginning of the season for the same reason.

This show actually does for Rogue One what a lot of people say the Filoni show does for the prequels. Rogue One is a better movie as the Serenity to Andor’s Firefly than it is as a paint by numbers steal the Death Star plans prequel movie.

KumoNin said:

This seems to be an unpopular opinion among the American monomyth enjoyers, but

I don’t think Luthen and Kleya “have” to die. I don’t think characters that we don’t see in the OT have to die. I don’t think that characters who have done questionable things for the rebellion don’t get to experience and participate in rebuilding the new, better world, and heal together with the more pure of heart characters. Luthen has been cut out of the chain of command, and there’s no reason he can’t have continued to be a spy on Coruscant or something through the war. The rebel life he leads is one of the riskiest of all the people in the rebellion, but it would definitely be a nice subversion of the cowboy trope for the guy who’s sacrificing everything for “a sunrise he knows he will never see” to actually be one of the few OGs that do get to see that sunrise in the end.

As for Dedra, I think she finds out what they’re really doing with those rocks, and I don’t know what’s going to happen, but probably the obvious thing would be for her to eventually be posted on the Death Star, right?

Anyway, I agree with all the praises of the show’s nuanced writing and music and stuff, obviously. There is room for different genres in Star Wars, but I do miss this level of subtlety in other shows (namely whenever Filoni does a politics-related plot or whenever anyone but Zahn writes Thrawn…)

Completely agree.

timdiggerm said:

The press release page linked at the top is pretty interesting. Most of those projects have actually happened. Rogue Squadron never got out of development hell, the Taika Waititi thing seems dead too, Rangers got cancelled for understandable reasons, and then there’s A Droid Story (???). But the rest! It all happened!

They also snuck Lando in there, which didn’t happen

I don’t mind all the different title cards and such, but I really hate the Disney intro on everything where it flashes blue and red on all the helmets/droid faces. I think it’s tacky.

Channel72 said:

I think Star Dates contain meta-information about the actual episode or season number, IIRC. But I doubt they were ever used consistently. In reality, an actual inter-stellar calendar system would have to somehow compensate for the bizarre, counter-intuitive fact about our Universe that “now” is a subjective concept entirely dependent on the location and speed of an observer.

Anyway, yeah the Battle of Endor makes more sense logically as a starting point for the new calendar. From an in-Universe perspective, I don’t know when the new dating system officially began. Was it established immediately after the Battle of Yavin (perhaps partially as a propaganda tool for the Rebellion) or did they think of it later and then retroactively apply it backwards to begin at Yavin? Who knows, I doubt any canonical source addresses the issue. In any case, real world calendars are often conceived of after the fact and then applied retroactively to some past duration of time. Perhaps in retrospect, the Rebels came to believe that the Battle of Yavin was like a “sacred turning point” in their favored historical narrative, and so they chose that as “Year 0”.

Obviously, the real world explanation is that Star Wars 1977 is where it all began. I’ve also seen newer timelines from official Disney material that use Episode 7 and the destruction of Starkiller base as the start of a new dating system or reference point. (bleh…) It’s like the Disney “regime” took some cues from actual dictators and rewrote (fictional) history to center around a new favored cult of personality.

Yeah I think this is correct. They either applied it retroactively or they jumped the gun and decided it was the most important thing ever before they knew an even bigger victory was a few years away.

Yeah after Return of the Jedi I think general audiences were done with it. There wasn’t anything new coming out in theaters and the hype died down. Among true fans the RPG and the Thrawn trilogy started a small revival that endured through books, comics, and video games.

However I don’t think the prequels were ever “cool” at the time. People watched them because they were big budget spectacle and because of the Star Wars name, but I remember that they were not taken seriously. Jar Jar, kid Anakin, then teen Anakin in AotC were heavily mocked. So was the dialogue in all three.

Certain aspects like Darth Maul were definitely cool and had an outsized influence in merchandise. The EU continued booming with books, comics, and video games, but those were still largely limited to true fans and gamers.

I still don’t think it’s necessarily “cool” now. It’s more that it just lingers everywhere and has merchandise everywhere. There’s nothing particularly youthful about it; the same boomers that post minion memes on facebook also post/buy Baby Yoda stuff. There will probably never be the same level of hype there was during 1977.

oojason said:

Vladius said:

I thought everything was really tastefully done including the one scene with Bix, except for the over the top references to undocumented illegal alien farm workers. I get that that kind of thing could happen because the Empire is full of oppressive busybodies who love getting people in trouble for paperwork, but I think the implication that that’s an analogous situation to the US is kind of crass.

I don’t believe it is analogous situation just with the US - many of us in UK & Europe are well aware of what has been taking place in relation to long reliance of undocumented food workers (in the fields / and in restaurants / and in effect the larger ‘gig’ economy; that authorities have previously acknowledged and turned a blind eye to in the main - and yet also eager to clamp down on a whim). In the UK’s case, all the way back to Brexit and the resulting fallout from that. I can’t speak for other areas around the world - I don’t know enough about that; though I wouldn’t be surprised if people across the planet the planet… recognise what is going on in the farm field scenes… and correlate with their own similar issues in relation to the treatment of undocumented workers or refugees simply looking for safe shelter, work, and place to start a new life - and looking to integrate and contribute to that place.
 

Andor filmed from November 2022 to February 2024 (with gaps for the strikes) - before the US election in November 2024; and the resulting the re-election of convicted felon and rapist ‘Orange Man’ who you refer to in a later post.

Now, if the actor who played the Imperial officer who attempted to rape Bix had weird combed-over ginger hair and couldn’t complete his dialogue without including outrageous falsehoods or trailing off into incoherence in an attempt to deflect away from answering questions or his actions… we all may have been having a different conversation. 👍
 

Credit to everyone involved in the handling of the scene with Bix; not just the tone, content and writing - but also the stunt-work, editing and both the actors. The actor/stuntman who played the Imperial officer really hit it out of the park in adding to the realism of the scene (plus him being dazed and concussed - losing control of his faculties and bouncing off the scenery like that really added to it). Adria Arjona was superb - which is no surprise given the quality of her performances throughout the show (like so many other top talents in this series).

It’s still not a situation that’s analogous. A galaxy with countless inhabitable planets and high amounts of automation is much different from the real world in terms of what that would mean for border security and the economics of farming.

My main issue with it is that the Empire controls both whichever planet they came from, and the farm planet. Obviously they don’t want to let slip that they’re from Ferrix (which is a different problem than someone entering the US from Mexico, for instance) but it doesn’t really matter what planet they’re from because the Empire controls the whole galaxy. If they’re legally imperial citizens then they would hypothetically be able to go to any planet available to the public. If someone wants to voluntarily go work on a farm on a dedicated farm planet, go ahead, knock your socks off. It would be like someone moving between states in the US or cities in the UK or what have you. It’s completely different from citizens of other countries crossing over the borders of the US or UK.

The main reason the Empire would implement visas and such would be for monitoring purposes. They want to know who’s going where and keep track of them in case some of them are criminals or rebels. While this is one aspect of immigration law (a legitimate one) it doesn’t make sense to drag the farming labor stuff into it.

We have to import people from other planets because the lazy natives don’t want to do the work! Okay, what natives? It’s completely empty except for the people you already brought here from other planets. There’s no language barrier. There’s no ethnic issues. There’s no species issues since they’re all pretty much human. There’s not really any hugely significant cultural differences because the galaxy is already highly interconnected through space travel. There’s no state infrastructure or healthcare services they’re taking up that they wouldn’t be taking up somewhere else in the same Empire.

This is why it feels so jarring and out of place. They’re not really “undocumented” illegal in the real world sense at all. They moved from Pennsylvania to Indiana and didn’t update their stuff at the local DMV because they would get flagged by the cops for fleeing a crime scene. They didn’t move from Venezuela to Indiana and ignore the green card process because they had to find a below minimum-wage job.

Good to know you have TDS.

It is a “political” show in that it explores what authoritarian governments can be like, in a way that isn’t just applicable to a 1930s German political party. It can also be broadly applied to anyone who abuses power, and to the Foucault-like nature of modern life structured around disciplinary institutions and prisons. This is why it’s widely appreciated and not seen as “political” in the sense of being propaganda purely aimed at people living in the 2020s. Whether centered around Orange Man or any other issues.

However like I said before there is an exception to this now, with the illegal undocumented immigrants parts. For me it has a pass for now but that’s strike one.